What’s Overboost?

Overboost is a racing game that’s currently being built within the Blender Game Engine. It’s going to be awesome.

Why make a game?

Originally, Overboost started as an experiment I was playing with the idea of starting a racing game, then mission creep kicked in and I started working on other things (surface alignment script that’s still in progress, experiments with writing GLSL filters) that were tangentially related to a racing game.

After doing that for a bit, and a new year had started, I jumped back on the racing game idea by looking into various ways of walking the freedom in the physics engine back, since it’s somewhat open when left to it’s default settings. From there the controls developed and became a bit better, I had created a handful of other assets to use for testing while improving my python skills with help from the BGE Python Support forums. Other things have come along as well, such as a basic HUD for the game along with adding variation in the vehicle’s performance, depending on the current speed.

Who’s working on this?

At this moment, Overboost is a one man show for the art and programming/scripting of the game. I’m undecided how sound will be done, since that part hasn’t been a big focus lately.

How’s it being made? What’s it going to look like?

For my development process, I’ll be switching from periods of programming to periods of art. There is a game design document floating around on my hard drive that hasn’t been touched for a bit, but I don’t have any concrete timeframes for milestone completion just yet. At this time, I’m shooting to have the game released around the beginning of next year.

Since I’m nearing then end of a period of programming/scripting soon, the art will be picking up, since I’ll have enough to work with as far as putting different vehicles and effects into the game. I intend on putting out a small demo of the game at the end of the programming period, so I’ll be posting a special update once that milestone is reached. Other updates will be coming at semi-regular intervals on my website.

As for the look of the game itself, it’s still in some limbo as well, but I’d like to think that humanity isn’t going to be stuck on Earth forever, will get it’s act together and see the stars up close. Along with that, humanity working with nature instead of against it, is part of the themes I’ve been tossing around mentally.

Where’s it going?

I plan on targeting Linux, Mac OS X and Windows for the time being. Mobile platforms may come later, once I learn how to port the game to an appropriate engine, or Blender gets ported to Android and runs nicely.

I’ve included a video of where things stand at this moment. Thanks for checking it out!